Etel Adnan | Galerie Lelong

Installation view: dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany, June 9 – September 16, 2012.

Etel Adnan’s career spanned six decades and encompassed a wide range of media—including painting, drawing, tapestry, film, ceramics, and leporello artist books—as it did traditions and locations. Adnan was first an author of poetry and prose, often addressing and protesting the turmoil of war and colonialism. Informing her writing and later her artwork as well, was the landscape, its own history and her emotional and physical response to it. For Adnan, the landscape is mingled with memory, especially a sentiment of displacement, as she was born and raised in Lebanon, but lived, studied, and worked in France and California throughout her life.
“I realized how much materials, for artists,

are things that mediate thought… how much they become the elements of one’s expression,

and instead of being just a support,

they become in a way a co-author of one’s work.”

—Etel Adnan
Etel Adnan, Dans la forêt, 2021. Ceramic wall mural. Permanent commission for LUMA Arles, France.

The Guggenheim Museum, New York, hosted Adnan’s most recent solo exhibition at a US-based institution, Light’s New Measure (2021). Numerous other museums have presented solo exhibitions of the artist’s work, including the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany (2023); Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands (2022); Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (2021); Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg City (2019); Aspen Museum of Art, Aspen, Colorado (2019); SFMoMA, California (2018); Zentrum Paul Klee, Switzerland (2018); MASS MoCA, Massachusetts (2018); Institute du Monde Arabe, France (2017); the Serpentine Gallery, England (2016); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Switzerland (2016); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland (2015); Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria (2014-2015); and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar (2014). In 2012, Adnan was included in Documenta (13) in Germany. Adnan’s work is included in major public collections such as the British Museum, England; Centre Pompidou, France; Institut du Monde Arabe, France; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; M+, Hong Kong, China; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Museum of Modern Art, Tunisia; Tate, London, England; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Numerous books of Adnan’s poetry and prose have been published internationally, with recent volumes including Je suis un volcan criblé de météores: Poésies 1947-1997 (2023) and Shifting the Silence (2020). Her latest collection of essays, Voyage, War, Exile will be published by Litmus Press in 2025. Adnan’s most recent catalogue, Etel Adnan: Erquy, was published in 2024 by Galerie Lelong & Co., Paris.

Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1925. She died in Paris, France in 2021.

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  Etel Adnan's "Discovery of Immediacy" 12 February 2022
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